Behind the screens at Dreamworks

Forbes magazine reports director Steven Spielberg, the subject of a new book about Dreamworks, paid his first wife, actress Amy Irving, $100 million US in their 1989 divorce.Getty Images
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The Men Who Would Be King

An almost epic tale of moguls, movies and a company called DreamWorks

By Nicole LaPorte

491 pages, Thomas Allen, $34.95

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If you can believe journalist Nicole LaPorte, there's always a motorcycle parked outside Steven Spielberg's office. It's never been used, but (contends LaPorte) it's always available “so that, in the event of the unthinkable, he has a getaway.”

The man responsible for Jurassic Park, Saving Private Ryan, Jaws and other mega-hits also provides his employees with “survival kits, including jump suits, gas masks and other essential emergency gear.” That's in anticipation of a terrorist attack or natural disaster.

LaPorte, who sees Spielberg's behaviour as indicative of “a burgeoning near-paranoia” offers many such tidbits in her new book, The Men Who Would Be King, a sometimes scintillating and sometimes laboured account of the rise and fall of DreamWorks, the upstart movie studio founded by Spielberg and fellow industry heavyweights, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg.

Spielberg, especially, fascinates her. We're told of rocks with hidden microphones, the Plexiglas dish positioned above his desk to ensure that sound does not travel and his phone conversations remain private, and the live camera that beams his office interior back to Spielberg's house when the great man is not at work.

When it comes to trawling for intriguing anecdotes, LaPorte, a former Variety staff writer, is nothing if not zealous.

Some of my favourites deal with the notoriously bad-tempered Russell Crowe, who behaved like a prima donna through much of the filming of Gladiator, the Oscar-winning historical epic.

Here's Crowe phoning a 77-year-old producer at 3 a.m. with a complaint that his personal assistants for the shoot were being paid too little. After greeting Branko Lustig, a Holocaust survivor, with an unprintable reference to the old gentleman's mother, Crowe screamed: “I will kill you with my bare hands!” According to LaPorte, Lustig was so traumatized, he told Spielberg he was leaving the project. “Steven, I'm leaving. Russell wants to kill me.”

With a budget of more than $100 million, Gladiator was the fledgling studio's most expensive venture so far. Its subsequent box-office and Oscar triumphs are ironic, given the behind-the-scenes histrionics. A frequently hungover Crowe seemed to never stop complaining: The script was hopeless; his character made no sense. During shooting in Morocco, he sulked for days after challenging members of the crew to a foot race and then losing; he grumbled that it was hard to run in the sand in sandals. And, if a badly written scene worked on film, it was because of his gifts. “It was s---,” Crowe told director Ridley Scott, “but I'm the greatest actor in the world and I can make even s--- feel good.”

So let's be clear about one thing: The Men Who Would Be King has lots of entertaining moments. But when it comes to offering an informative slice of corporate history, LaPorte's success is more problematic.

DreamWorks arrived in October 1994, when Spielberg announced he was joining forces with former Disney animation head Katzenberg and billionaire recording mogul Geffen to create a new kind of movie studio — one “driven by ideas and the people who have them.”

It was a noble ideal. But despite a brief period of triumphs — Saving Private Ryan, Gladiator, American Beauty, Shrek — the original DreamWorks vision is dead and, with it, the original studio.

It was perhaps the loftiest and most visionary entertainment venture for decades — but it was a vision that never took flight. Today, Katzenberg runs DreamWorks Animation, now a public company. Spielberg has a small movie-production house under the name DreamWorks, largely controlled by Indian investors. Geffen is nowhere to be seen.

LaPorte's problem was that none of the three principals would talk to her. Forging ahead, she did find insiders ready to talk, many fearfully requesting anonymity. But the fact remains that she was denied the co-operation of the essential players. Furthermore, in telling the DreamWorks corporate story (the wheeling and dealing, the personality conflicts, the betrayals), she has trouble with structure and organization.

Still, the saga's central irony does emerge: DreamWorks would never have happened if Disney's autocratic boss, Michael Eisner, had not forced his loyal but ambitious lieutenant, Katzenberg, out of the Mouse House.

Spielberg and Geffen were appalled at the way their friend had been treated — and in a very real sense, DreamWorks was their way of finding a job for him. And really, it is Katzenberg who comes out the best: He may emerge as a control freak and a micro-manager who made as many as 150 phone calls a day; he may have cost the studio hundreds of millions by clinging to classical animation in defiance of the computer revolution before striking pay dirt with Shrek; he may have been a computer illiterate who preferred to answer his e-mails by fax; but repeatedly, he was the steadiest hand at the helm.

Much of the book fulfils what we know already:that Geffen was largely an absentee boss, with a short fuse and a tendency to profane tirades and bullying; and that Spielberg left colleagues in despair with his refusal to confine his directing jobs to the studio he had helped found, and which needed his personal prestige and commitment to remain afloat. Furthermore, LaPorte suggests that Spielberg always gave priority to the financial well-being of himself and the stars he recruited. The making of Minority Report, a co-production with Fox, was a case in point. Spielberg and Tom Cruise took home more than $70 million, but Fox and DreamWorks, at best, received no more than $20 million each out of the profits.

Still, LaPorte's sense of proportion sometimes falters. She spends too much time probing the woes of Mouse Hunt, and is surprisingly cursory about Road To Perdition, a genuine achievement. Sometimes, as well, she is too cavalier in some of her indictments: Contrary to what she suggests, Spielberg has a surprisingly good track record when it comes to meeting the media and promoting his films.

The book's biggest pleasures come from its many intriguing revelations:

• Jim Carrey was a notorious prima donna during the filming of Lemony Snicket, complaining about his makeup and prosthetics, and demanding multiple takes. (It took 5,000 feet of film for a shot of Carrey walking out the door.) While Meryl Streep drove to the set every day in her rented Prius, Carrey insisted on a helicopter each morning.

• Spielberg was thwarted in his determination to direct Harry Potter, after refusing to budge in his plan to combine several of the books into “one of the greatest movies of all time.”

• During much of its filming, Shrek was considered the ugly stepchild, inferior to such ambitious animation projects as Prince Of Persia and Road To Eldorado, both subsequent box-office disappointments.

• Geffen strongly opposed Spielberg's decision to make Munich, telling him it would be bad for the studio and bad for Jews.

The book doesn't exactly celebrate the destruction of three people's dreams, although one senses a certain unconcealed pleasure in LaPorte's conclusion that plans for a huge new studio complex in Playa Vista had been a vital way of securing Spielberg's involvement in DreamWorks. When the plans were scrapped, it was terrible news because “Playa Vista had been like a giant dose of Ritalin for the kid with the roving attention span.”

But the bottom line remains: Even people as genuinely creative and brilliant as these three are fallible human beings. Why should we be shocked?

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